The toxicity of the Tories is the most important fact of British politics

Britain’s Liberal Democrats will do much better in the country’s General Election on 7 May than most people expect. That’s because expectations are so low. The party is fighting hard in 50-60 marginal seats where they have a base to work with, and that intensive ground war is paying dividends, as shown in last week’s constituency polls published by the Ashcroft organisation. But outside those seats the party’s predicament is dire. The party used to routinely pick up 10-15% across the country, and lost few if any election deposits (which require 5% of the vote). Now its national poll rating seems stuck at about 8% and in many seats a lost deposit looks very likely. The party is considered to be such an irrelevance that few people noticed a feisty performance by their leader Nick Clegg in last week’s seven-way leaders’ debate. What has happened?

The answer is simple: coalition with Britain’s Conservative Party. The party has learnt the hard way what many had suspected beforehand. The Conservative brand is so toxic to so many people in the UK that another party doing a deal with it, or a least a deal where the Conservatives play the lead role, suffers a kiss of death. Those who don’t consider the Tories toxic (30-40% of the electorate) vote for the party; nobody else will touch any party that deals with it. This lesson has been marked well by Britain’s other centre and left of centre parties: the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the Greens. Even for the far-right Ukip the issue is a delicate one. They have been fishing for votes enthusiastically amongst Conservative inclined voters. But Labour inclined working class and lower middle class votes are strategically important to them. These voters do not have the sort of progressive, liberal attitudes that many on the left assume. And yet for them the Tory brand is as toxic as for anybody else.

And this toxicity is vital to understanding how politics will play after the election. The Conservatives may well win a plurality of seats, but well short of a majority. But it will be more than difficult for them to do deals to allow them to form a government. The SNP (who might well win big in Scotland), Plaid Cymru and the Greens (though they are only likely to have a single MP) will not touch them – even to abstain. Ukip and the Lib Dems will be more than wary. The Lib Dems stand open to the possibility, but will surely demand too high a price. A grand coalition with Labour, in spite of my speculation last year, would destroy that party (they tried it with painful consequences in the 1930s) absent a state of war. Only Ulster Unionists stand ready to deal, at the cost of taking the province’s politics forward.

Labour, on the other hand, are in a much stronger position. An outright coalition with this most tribal of parties would be a tall order for any party. But some kind of lesser deal involving conditional support or abstention is feasible for all the other parties, apart from Ukip – including the Conservatives, if that suited their purposes (a referendum on Europe, perhaps). That makes a Labour led government much the most likely outcome of this election, although it might take some time to come together.

It’s worth pondering how this situation has come about.  The Tory brand has always been toxic to many working-class voters, based on old-fashioned class loyalties. The party’s reluctance to embrace non-white immigration has extended this toxicity to most ethnic minority communities, even in the middle-classes. But class feeling is in slow decline. The picture amongst ethnic minorities is more complex, but the Conservatives have moved on from their racist attitudes for the most part. These forces should be declining, but the problem for the Tories is not.

A further problem arises from the distribution of the party’s votes. It is becoming more concentrated in relatively prosperous areas, especially in the south-east of England. Under Britain’s single member constituency electoral system this reduces the number of seats they can win. But this does not explain the party’s toxicity, except to give a regional slant to the party’s image. It is why the party’s toxicity is more of a problem for it.

I suspect developments in the economy have a lot to do with it. The Conservatives are the party of economic winners. Not so long ago upward mobility was a more general expectation. So even if the winners were in a minority, many more people would aspire to do well, and so associate with the party. The message of self-reliance and making good through your own efforts, without the state and taxes getting in the way, appealed to many working class and lower middle class voters. Margaret Thatcher (and her predecessor Ted Heath) were from this upwardly mobile background, and successfully maintained a broad class appeal. But now upward mobility seems blocked for many people.  Those with less good education, poorer social networks or living in the wrong places saw diminished possibilities for betterment. Indeed, steady industrial era jobs were replaced by poorer quality service ones. There is a strong sense of us-and-them with little mobility between them (or more precisely little upward mobility and the constant risk of downward mobility).  And the Tories are often blamed for making things worse – as much de-industrialisation occurred on Mrs Thatcher’s watch. Tory appeals to self-reliance now look like heartlessness – even amongst the better off.

Amongst the Tories themselves there seems to be a pernicious negative feedback loop. The party attracts people that can only be described as nasty. The old consensual “one-nation” Toryism is long dead, and even Mrs Thatcher’s habitual caution too. There is also a wholly unbalanced obsession with the European Union, seen as the source of all the country’s ills. David Cameron, who is not part of this nasty tendency, struggles to contain these toxic types. It is interesting to speculate what might have become of the party had it won outright in 2010 and governed alone. I suspect that the party would be even more toxic that now.

People on the left might chuckle at the prospect of the Tories becoming so toxic that they are likely to be banished from power. And yet they represent a third of the electorate. And much of what is not Tory is a stale, backward looking muddle with little idea of how to take the country forward beyond extending bureaucratic blather to all corners of life. The country would be better governed if Tories were engaged in the political dialogue, rather than treated as toxic pariahs. But they largely have themselves to blame.

 

Labour’s voodoo economics

“Voodoo economics” was the name given by George Bush Senior to his presidential rival Ronald Reagan’s economic ideas when the two were vying for the Republican nomination in 1980. Mr Bush’s scepticism proved well-founded. Now I don’t accuse Labour of promoting the same ideas – but there is the same sort optimistic logic and build-up of false expectations amongst supporters. Except that in Labour’s case it will be politically much riskier if they actually achieve power.

The original voodoo economics, or “Reaganomics” to its supporters, is associated with two ideas in particular. The first is “trickle down” – if the rich become wealthier then soon enough everybody else will benefit. So it’s OK to cut taxes on the rich – which would stimulate economic growth that benefits everybody. The other idea is known as the “Laffer curve”. If you cut taxes rates then in due course tax revenues increase because economic growth enlarges the tax base.

Reagan won the presidential nomination, and then the presidency for two terms. He wasn’t quite as  reckless as is often portrayed with tax cuts, but he did oversee more liberal economic policies that coincided with renewed economic growth. Mr Bush succeeded him in the 1988 election, and was then forced to raise taxes, in spite of his “read my lips” pledge against “new taxes”. He then lost out to Bill Clinton in 1992, who both raised taxes and oversaw a period of rapid economic growth. Trickle down was notably absent in this period, where median earnings in the US did not track overall economic growth; inequality rose sharply. There was no convincing evidence of the Laffer curve effect either, hence Mr Bush’s predicament. This still hasn’t stopped tax cutting being a central tenet of the US right’s faith.

So what is Labour’s voodoo? This is the idea that raising the wages of the lower-paid will generate sustainable economic growth, which in turn will generate tax revenues from which public services like the NHS can be funded. I’ve heard some such line of argument presented by Labour spokespeople over the last week. It replaces the classical Keynesian stimulus idea that the party had been peddling, until the the economy inconveniently grew and soaked up the slack needed to make such a policy work.

How might this idea work? Well I think it stems from the observation that productivity is weaker in Britain than in many other developed economies – notably France and Germany. So, if employers are forced to pay their workers more, they should be able to find ways of raising productivity to pay for it. And if they do that, the economy as a whole benefits, as well as the lower paid workers.  After all when Labour introduced the minimum wage under Tony Blair, the sky did not fall in. This isn’t nonsensical, but to put it generously, it is open to risk. Employers might indeed raise productivity, but they might well sack workers at the same time. In other words they would produce the same volume with fewer workers, rather than more with the same number. The result would be an increase in unemployment. And this is surely the most likely outcome. The examples of France and Germany are not encouraging: both have been haunted by high levels of unemployment to match their more generous levels of pay. East German pay was rapidly equalised after unification, for example, and the results were disastrous.

The truth is that nobody really understands why British productivity is so weak. Has it always been so, and simply exposed by the come-uppance of sectors like finance and oil which had disguised it? Is it based on poor skill levels, as employers tend to claim? Is it lack of capital investment forcing businesses into labour intensive operations? Or does it simply reflect the bargaining power of employers that will be sorted out as soon as the labour market becomes a bit tighter? I suspect that it is a combination of all of these factors.  Without knowing the causes of poor productivity, it is impossible to know whether any particular policy will work, or do more harm than good.

Of course Labour’s purpose isn’t to convince sceptics – it’s simply to confuse voters who are tempted to vote Conservative based on its economic record, and to give its core supporters some kind of fig leaf with which to cover the flaws in their treasured policy beliefs.

The problem will start if Labour win power, which, albeit probably as a minority, remains the most likely outcome of the election. As they push up the minimum wage and create a bureaucratic morass intended to encourage the use of the higher “living wage” and restrict the use of zero-hours contracts, they will not find the economy responds as they hope. Soon enough they will be forced to backtrack, if not on these policies then others, especially those involving taxation and public spending.

The Labour leadership remind me of the French Socialists under François Hollande. They developed a series of crowd-pleasing leftish policies, which helped secure them victory in 2012. Then the trouble started, and they were forced to backtrack. Their popularity fell into an abyss, to the benefit of the far right Front National. Something similar is building in British politics. Ukip, from the right, the Greens, from the left, and the Lib Dems from the centre are waiting to pounce on disillusioned Labour voters.

 

Are the Tories winning the air war and losing the ground war?

Britain’s electorate does not choose a Prime Minister in May’s General Election. It chooses a local MP. And enough of them have already made up their mind in England and Wales to make that choice a foregone conclusion in most places, so that the real fight is occurring in a limited number of marginal seats. Has the Conservative Party forgotten this basic architecture of British politics?

That might explain something that is rather puzzling about the election campaign. The Conservatives are having a good “air war” in the expression made famous by Bill Clinton. That means coverage on general media on a largely national level. Labour’s strategy seems to be that government’s lose elections rather than oppositions win them. They have not spelled out a clear alternative vision for the country – preferring to keep party unity intact by concentrating on complaining about the coalition government.

Thus Labour have surrendered the initiative in the air war. The Tories have exploited this brilliantly with “bait and switch” tactics. They fly a kite about some policy or other (public expenditure is the biggest; VAT is this week’s example). Labour duly attack, only for the Conservatives to move in a different direction. And they have undermined Labour’s attempt to create sound-bite policies. For example Labour promised to cut student tuition fees by removing a tax break for pension contributions for the wealthier; the coalition duly  removed the tax break and baked it into the budget baseline. Meanwhile previous Labour attacks, on Keynesian economic management, on unemployment and on energy prices have been undermined by events. The Tory leader, David Cameron, seems at ease and in control – even his supposed gaffe over not wanting to serve more than two terms plays to that impression. In contrast Labour’s Ed Miliband has turned into Britain’s whingemaster general – without giving any impression that he would do any better himself. The Conservatives are well organised; they have powerful allies in the press, which still seem to set the agenda for broadcast media, especially the BBC. Labour are being routed.

But here’s the puzzle: it seems to be having little effect on their poll ratings. Both parties have been edging up slightly, at the expense of the insurgent Ukip. The Conservatives cannot establish the lead they need to overcome the awkward distribution of their vote under the country’s electoral system. Notwithstanding Labour’s impending disaster in Scotland (where, unlike England and Wales, most seats could change hands) the Conservatives do not look as if they will even be the largest party in parliament, still less win outright. Party HQ reassures the nervous footsoldiers that things will turn good in the last weeks. Maybe.

But things are worse than that. A recent survey by the Ashcroft organisation of key Labour-Tory marginals showed that Labour was ahead in all but one. Constituency polls also show the Tory coalition partners the Liberal Democrats confounding their dismal national poll rating in Tory-facing marginal seats. The Lib Dem position grows stronger the more voters are reminded that they are voting for their local MP, and not the national leader. And this poses the question: are the Conservatives losing the “ground war”? The process of direct voter contact by doorstep, phone, social media and locally tailored literature – which is focused on those marginal seats.

The Tories seem to have a weakness here. They don’t attract many younger supporters these days (in striking contrast to Labour), and their policies don’t seem designed to engage with that group anyway. Many of their older activists have defected to Ukip, are demotivated, or are, well, just getting too old. Money can help. One marginal reports literature being delivered at full cost by the Royal Mail. Hired help can make up some of the gap on literature delivery. But it is much less effective in direct voter contact – canvassing – and useless in social media interaction. Direct mail, a past Tory favourite, seems to be losing its value for money.

Labour, meanwhile, have upped their game. They are well organised, disciplined and, in many cases, downright cunning. Here in Battersea – which they lost in 2010 and which many had assumed was out reach this time – they have been using camouflaged front campaigns on the NHS and something called Women of Wandsworth (WoW) Mums. They also seem to be outgunning their opponents on literature. The Lib Dems have always been quite good at the ground war, and are targeting their efforts ruthlessly to make up for their reduced number of activists.

So ground war may be trumping the air war. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom of British politcos, who almost always attribute the success of past Labour or Tory campaigns to the air war (though not those of the other parties). This may always have been overdone. It may be that the parties’ ground war campaigns have cancelled each other out better in the past. But it may also be that British electors make their choices differently these days. The coalition may have damaged the Lib Dems’ appeal, but it has planted the idea that smaller parties matter. Cynicism over national politics has always run ahead of the standing of local MPs – from whom people expect more, even as opinions of politicians in general sink. Besides, national news media may be being crowded out by web and social media (even if their content is overwhelmingly non-political).

It may even prove a mistake for the Conservatives to have torpedoed the leader debates, whose original structure supported their two-party narrative and could have drawn more people into the air war.

Or maybe, as Tory politicians hope, people will come to their senses in the coming weeks: something which both Labour and Lib Dem politicians also hope in their different ways. But my betting is that the game has changed and politicians need to catch up.

Why the soggy centre is a good place for the Lib Dems to be

The most recent issue of Liberator, the anti-establishment Liberal magazine, has more than its usual quota of groans about how the Lib Dems have failed to define clearly what they stand for. There is particular venom reserved for the idea that the party should be of the political centre, which implies a sort of rootlessness, allowing itself to be defined by others.

Much of this comes from seasoned campaigners, and there is much wisdom in what they say. But I also sense a rather wilful failure to address how politics really works.

For example, in his article, the veteran Kingston campaigner Roger Hayes says this:”And why do they think people are turning to UKIP and the Greens? Because they seem stand for something and aren’t afraid to say so.” And yet earlier in the same article he says this: “For all their noise and bluster Ukip are likely to take less than a handful [of] seats if they are lucky. The Greens will probably see their national vote soar….but in terms of seats they won’t do better than see Caroline Lucas returned…”. Which leads to the question: if the Lib Dems articulated themselves more clearly, like Ukip and the Greens, would they end up in the same frustrated but powerless place?

Or take another perspective, from talking to a party worker in one the Lib Dem held seats: she explained carefully that they aren’t looking for votes from just liberals. They needed a broad spectrum of people to vote for them. And that is real politics. Talking to diverse groups of people and trying to forge common ground. To be fair on Mr Hayes, he knows all about this – the Kingston Lib Dems are brilliant at it. But it is easy to see how parliamentary campaigners, when trying to move into a winning position, find sharp, clear messages on where the party stands not entirely helpful. For example, the party has some rather clear views on immigration that many candidates would like to soft-pedal.

And this reflects a wider truth about politics that often seems to be overlooked by people who craft political messages. If you want to say something to persuade voters that you are sincere, you need to say something that hurts; which means saying something that will lose you votes. Otherwise you are just uttering cheap words. Voters used to respect the integrity of politicians like Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, and say things like “their voices should be heard.” But they were politically toxic. And under the British electoral system if you don’t appeal to a broad spectrum of voters, you are unlikely to win any sort of representation. Both Benn and Powell needed to tap tribal loyalties or rank populism (Powell’s disingenuous statements on immigration were intended to stoke up racism) in order to maintain their political platform – and even then they were frozen out of actual power.

Politicians can have a sharp ideological edge and be successful. Margaret Thatcher is the obvious example. But that requires both strong political skills and a thirst for change among the electorate. When for Mrs Thatcher both of these ran out in her third term, she was soon gone, replaced by the un-ideological John Major. Today there is much discontent amongst the electorate, but none of the sense of direction that might support change. The electoral system, for example, is clearly failing, but there no strong political movement to change it. And I don’t think our current crop of political leaders and their “strategist” advisers (including, but not restricted to, the Lib Dems) have the political skills to pull off a platform for radical change. And if there is a clear case for strong, liberal political reforms (and there is…) it is far to late to make these part of a winning platform for the next election.

So sharp political clarity is a quick route to electoral failure. There’s something else though. There is a political gap in Britain’s political centre at the moment. Both Britain’s main parties are tempted by their ideological extremes, and by populism. This partly reflects the rise of the Ukip and Green insurgents, who are eating into both parties’ bases (especially Ukip and the Conservatives). But it is also reflects their own memberships, which are becoming more ideological. Increasingly these two main parties are not fighting each other. Instead they are fending off the insurgents and trying to persuade disgruntled non-voters to come out in their support. They are also trying to secure the votes of the Lib Dem supporters, or rather, their former supporters, some 15% of the electorate.

But because both Labour and the Conservatives are being pulled away by their extremes, the appeal of a party without such extremists, that seems to stand for sensible, pragmatic government, is surely growing. The Conservative Party is no longer trying to shake off its image as the Nasty Party, opposed to diversity and environmentalism. The Labour Party isn’t so openly tempted by the extremes, but its policies don’t look as if they are thought through, or fully accepted by their MPs. So amongst their ideas for regenerating the economy they put forward  devolving powers to the cities of England. But as soon as the government suggests devolving powers on the NHS to Greater Manchester (negotiated by local Labour politicians, even), their leading spokesman comes out with the usual anti-devolution tropes. Likewise their policy on cutting student fees looks like gesture politics that doesn’t even convince its own side. A sensible, pragmatic government in waiting Labour is not.

Filling this gap in the centre, however uninspiring, is surely the best idea for the Lb Dems right now. There may be an ideological liberal vote out there to tap, but frankly the party is not in a good place to win it right now. There is too much anger over the party’s role in the coalition. But if the party can prove its worth as a party of the pragmatic centre – and shows its skill in winning parliamentary representation even when times are tough – then this is a platform from which liberals may be wooed in future elections. I don’t have a better idea.

Can any of Britain’s political parties break the deadlock?

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The rise of fringe parties takes British politics into a whole new era. and yet the outcome of the election due on 7 May 2015 seems strangely predictable. The parties seem to be stuck in a deadlock where none can win. What are the chances of one of them breaking free?

Britain’s electoral system (misleadingly referred to as “first past the post”) is capable of producing dramatic swings in the balance between the parties. But a plethora of constituency polls allows pundits to make some quite stable predictions this time. The main features are these: the Liberal Democrats will lose up to 30 seats of their current 57. The Scottish Nationalists (the SNP) will pick up a similar number, or perhaps more, giving them 30-40 seats overall. The new insurgent parties, Ukip and the Greens, will only pick up a handful of seats, and the latter maybe none at all. Overall Labour will advance, and the Conservatives will fall back. The main debate is whether Labour will be able to overhaul the Conservatives to become the largest party. Interestingly, the fortunes of both major parties will be largely determined by how well they do against the smaller parties rather than each other. But neither party will win enough seats to form a government with one of the smaller parties; they will need to do a deal with each other to form a stable government. This is the outcome nobody (except the SNP perhaps) wants.

Can any of the parties break out of this stalemate? Sudden changes of fortune can happen. Two stand out in recent history. The first was in 1992, when John Major’s Conservative government suddenly overhauled Labour in the last week of the election campaign to win a comfortable majority, under the slogan “Labour’s Tax Bombshell”. The second was Cleggmania in 2010, when the Liberal Democrats surged forward after the performance of their leader, Nick Clegg, in the first of the television leadership debates. The surge faded, but the party avoided the drubbing they were heading for, defending their record result in 2005.

Such sudden surges are entirely possible this time. No political leader dominates the scene as Margaret Thatcher  did in the elections of 1983 and 1987 or Tony Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005. As in 1992 and 2010, political leadership is weak, and so things can be more fluid. Public frustration with politics is high.

To understand that we only have to look at Scotland, where the SNP have surged forward after last year’s referendum on independence (or, more precisely, they are consolidating their spectacular gains in the Scottish Parliament in 2011). Labour, who are defending 40-odd seats at the election are in serious trouble. That surge, however, is already built in to the forecasts. The surprise might be if the anti-SNP vote rallies and votes tactically. That’s a real possibility, though – and it would mainly benefit Labour (whose majorities are generally big), and might stem some of the Lib Dems’ anticipated losses. It would be particularly satisfying if the Lib Dem candidate Christine Jardine is able to hold off former SNP leader Alec Salmond.

What of the English insurgents, Ukip? They won the European Parliament elections as recently as last year. But their support has sunk to 15% (less than the Lib Dems achieved last time) and it is too thinly spread. Their novelty is wearing thin, and there is quite a strong anti-Ukip reaction, visible in their leader’s negative approval ratings in polls. The press, who often set the news agenda, found it convenient to boost them, but they  are now poking fun at them. Yet they are well-funded and in some regions (along the south and east coasts especially) they might yet hit the zeitgeist, and pick up a few more seats than the pundits expect. There is a more remote possibility that they do well in northern urban Labour strongholds – but this looks too high a hurdle for them this year.

How about the other insurgents, the Greens? They have done well in the polls this year, catching up with the poor old Lib Dems quite often. They have picked up the “none of the above” vote that dislikes Ukip. They have the possibility of repeating Cleggmania and advancing into teens of %age of votes, if not better. But they could suffer if they come under scrutiny. They have a rather mad collection of policies and their leader, Natalie Bennett, struggles to break out of fringe appeal. There is a challenge for the party. If they could dump Ms Bennett as their figurehead and replace her with their only MP, the impressive Caroline Lucas, and if they ditch most of their silly policies as “aspirations”, with a more mainstream manifesto – then they might be in business. It would be a big moment of growing up – but, my sense is that they can’t. Too many activists would see such a move as a betrayal. A further difficulty is translating an advance in the polls into seats, as their vote is thinly based. They seem to do well where Labour are already strong – and they lack the time and organisation to marshal a stronger vote in particular seats.

Could the Conservatives repeat their feat of 1992, and break through to an overall majority? They have an impressively disciplined campaign. They could even repeat the tax bombshell line of 1992 line with some justice (Labour’s instincts are free-spending); and Labour’s leadership is seen as not up to it, again as in 1992. Their leader, David Cameron, may not as impressive as Mr Blair or Mrs Thatcher, but he is more convincing than John Major was. But. But. I just think that the Conservatives are on the wrong side of history and will find it impossible to extend their appeal enough. Back in the 1980s they were the party that broke the unions (which most people saw as a good thing) and made the country self-confident again. Mass affluence broke out – even if a lot of it was through the false wealth of rising property values.  Now we seem stuck; the rich do well, but few others. Even increasing property values are seen as double-edged, forcing youngsters from even affluent families back onto “the bank of Mum and Dad”. In the 2000s the Tory brand became toxic; they haven’t done enough to reverse that.  Tactically they are in a bind too. They need to win back Ukippers with sour policies on Britain’s international role and immigrants – while at the same time as appealing to more optimistic, liberal voters. I just can’t see a breakout. Their only hope of a breakthrough comes from the collective weakness of everybody else – which remains possible.

How about Labour? They have the opposite problem. They are much more in tune with the popular zeitgeist. They understand a lot of what people feel is wrong about society. But their narrative is chaotic. They look like a coalition of grumpy protest groups rather than a coherent government in waiting. I am reminded a little of Labour under Jim Callaghan in 1979: when they try to make a clear stand on a policy, one of their number undermines it. Tough on immigration? Protests from London MPs. Stop any serious reform of the NHS (which they call “saving” it) – yes one moment, no the next. The current awkwardness is on a promise to reduce university tuition fees. They want a headline policy to whack the coalition with (especially to consolidate former Lib Dem voters) – but how to do so without damaging universities or giving a gift just to the richer students? It seems as if the party has lost the discipline of the New Labour era. But the party does have some strengths – in particular an army of younger canvassers, especially in London, and probably the strongest central organisation of any UK political party.

Like the Tories, the main hope for Labour seems to be the weakness of others: the Lib Dems, the Greens, Ukip and the SNP. On the other hand, it is easier to foresee some sort of implosion by Labour than it is for the Tories. A public rift on economic policy could be the cause: the tension between their trade union backers and the more realistic parliamentarians is palpable. There is rather strange paradox here. Ed Miliband has kept the party together much better than expected over the last four years. But this has been achieved by placating rather than resolving the tensions within it. Which makes the unity and discipline less easy to achieve when it is most needed.

Which leaves the Lib Dems, in my review. Their fall has been dramatic. They commonly show up with a poll rating of just 7%, compared with the 23% they achieved in 2010. In many places they would do well to get 2-3%. But they have strongholds, and a strongly focused constituency-led campaign strategy is helping to limit the damage. They are helped by Ukip undermining the Conservative vote, though they seem to have fewer defences in the minority of seats where Labour is their main opponent. In terms of popular vote it is difficult to see the party falling much further – but there is a risk that their constituency-led strategy falls apart, and they are left with very few seats indeed. But they do have upside potential. Their hope is to be seen as a sensible, liberal party, with none of the extremist politics of Ukip or the Greens. The more Labour and the Conservatives move to the extremes to face the threat of Ukip in particular, the more appealing the Lib Dems might look. There is reason for them to hope that their poll ratings will rise – though this may make surprisingly little difference in terms of the number of seats that they lose. Indeed a surge in the polls might undermine the party discipline needed to make the constituency strategy work.

All of which leaves British politics in a predicament. An electoral system that used to practically guarantee a succession of stable single party governments, is now moving towards one that simultaneously disenfranchises most voters (by stranding them in seats where their vote makes no difference), while delivering a result from which it is hard to form a governing majority. And yet such is the conservatism of Britain’s politicians and public, that it is difficult to see any successful move to change it.

Cameron lets the cat out of the bag. The election isn’t a two-party contest

Last night David Cameron, Prime Minster and Conservative Party leader, announced that he would not take part in the proposed leadership debates this year’s UK General Election. Or rather, he wouldn’t unless the Green Party was also invited alongside Labour, Lib Dems and Ukip. This was after Ofcom, the media regulator, suggested that the Greens were not a major party, but that Ukip and the Lib Dems were.

In the petty tactical thinking that so dominates thinking amongst Westminster’s political elite, it is easy to understand Mr Cameron’s move. Two birds can be killed with one stone. First the Greens have emerged as a thorn in Labour’s side, as they are promoting an unambiguously leftist policy platform, and also attract Lib Dem defectors, who are central to Labour’s electoral strategy.  They do not trouble potential Tory voters though. The second aim is that Mr Cameron is not much interested in taking part in the debates anyway. These debates were an innovation in 2010, and greatly expanded political engagement, especially amongst younger voters. But the conventional Tory wisdom were that they were a mistake, assisting the Lib Dems at their expense. And this time Mr Cameron has more to lose than gain. Especially if Labour’s Ed Miliband turns out to be much less of clump than the Tories are portraying him to be.

The announcement was also an opportunity for Mr Cameron to sneer at his coalition partners, the Lib Dems. His claim for the Greens to be a major party was that the Greens beat the Lib Dems in last year’s European elections. But the Lib Dems have 57 seats and record in government to defend, compared to the Greens’ single seat. Mr Cameron’s voice dripped in sneering condescension in a way that only upper class Brits can do.

But it’s a strategic mistake, for all that. Along with the Labour party, the Tories claim that they are the only parties that matter in the election. Electors must choose between these two; everybody else is a waste of time. They dream that a few days before the election, electors will come to their senses and return to voting for the two establishment parties. But now Mr Cameron has painted a picture of a multiparty leadership debate, rather like those we saw on the Danish TV series Borgen. Yet this idea is toxic to the two-party vision. If he had said that he would only debate with Mr Miliband, it would have had strategic value.

All of which reinforces a general sense of Mr Cameron’s weakness as a prime minister. Too clever for his own good. Ever after gaining a tactical advantage, but with no idea of his, or his country’s, strategic interests.

The Lib dems – successful in government, unrewarded by the public

2015 is here at last. For British politicos this is the  endgame – the year of the General Election and the verdict on the politicking of the current parliament, elected in 2010. That election remains very open, but for the Liberal Democrats it is fair to say that things have gone disastrously off script.

The party languishes at 5-10% in the polls, compared to the over 20% it achieved in 2010. This has shown no sign of improving as the election approaches, and there have been plenty of real life elections to show that such dismal ratings are not just inaccurate polling.

This follows the party’s entry into coalition government in 2010, a ground-breaking event both for the party and for British politics. This government has been pretty successful all told. It inherited an utterly unsustainable government deficit that demanded cuts to both public services and benefits – “austerity”. It struck a fairly prudent course between extreme austerity, and using the relative ease of government borrowing to postpone the pain. For all the political sound and fury over the sense or otherwise of such austerity, there has been little difference between the main political parties on its scale.

There have been failures. Benefits had to be cut, but many of the reforms to the benefits system were misconceived.  The centrepiece reform of Universal Credit might be a nice idea in theory, but its dependence on unobtainable real-time data make its demise only a matter of time. Many attempts to sub-contract government services to the private sector have proved misconceived too. Reforms to the NHS were well-intentioned but it would surely have been more sensible to build on the previous government’s reforms incrementally. Reforms to immigration were popular but unhelpful to the nation’s economic and social health.

But there have been many sensible reforms along the way. A lot of bureaucratic over-engineering from the last government was dismantled. The management of schools is more sharply focused, with a welcome emphasis on the progress of pupils from more challenging backgrounds – and a search for performance measures that can be gamed less easily. Reforms to university finance have improved accountability and spread the financial burden more fairly. The burden of taxation has been shifted to a more progressive and redistributive pattern, not least with a spectacular crackdown on tax avoidance by the very rich. This has helped stem a rise in inequality – though I don’t think the statistics are conclusive as to whether inequality has actually been held in check. overall.

Many (or even most) of these sensible reforms have Liberal Democrat fingerprints on them. The party has proved good at the exigencies of being a governing party – including the discipline of its parliamentarians. A lot of small scale policies have been implemented that Lib Dems have spent years campaigning for (like being able to declare pubs as community assets). Previously characterised as being chaotic lightweights, Liberal Democrats have proved to be up to the job.

There have been major disappointments for Lib Dems in the area of political reform. A referendum on changing the voting system to the Alternative Vote just gave an opportunity for the rest of the political establishment to gang up on the party. Plans for an elected second chamber collapsed in the face of hostility and indifference from Conservative and Labour politicians. Ironically these disappointments may help the party’s fortunes. With the current state of public opinion AV might well have  helped the Conservatives and Labour more than the Lib Dems, allowing them to scoop up Ukip and Green votes. And the strong presence of Lib Dems in the House of Lords immeasurably adds to the party’s heft in any negotiations in a hung parliament – something the SNP, for example, cannot offer. In the PR elections the party wanted for the Lords (or rather, its replacement), it would almost certainly have been nearly wiped out, and surely behind Ukip, the SNP and perhaps even the Greens.

But Lib Dems had expected better rewards from the electorate. It is commonplace for governing parties to lose popularity in the middle of a parliament, but then they are meant to recover. The Liberal Democrats hoped to present themselves to the electorate as a credible coalition party, firmly rooted in the political centre – having put to rest any doubts that it was incapable of achieving practical political power.  Even as Labour and the Conservatives seem to be vacating the political centre, few centrist voters see the Lib Dems as a respectable alternative.

What went wrong? The first problem is that the party has disappointed many of its supporters. In 2010 (and earlier General Elections, come to that), the party set itself up as standing for a new brand of politics – and a break from the lies and cynicism of the other parties. But what the public saw was just another established party wheeler-dealing like the rest of them, and enjoying the prestige of ministerial office. Reforms to university finance may have been an elegant compromise in practice, but it involved reneging on a very categorical election pledge.

A further problem is that many of the party’s supporters were Labour defectors, who saw teaming up with the Conservatives as betrayal. The impact of austerity and reforms to the benefits system and the NHS hardly reassured these voters. That the party was in practice no worse than Labour wasn’t really the point; they hoped for better. The Tory brand remains as toxic as ever.

But all is not lost. The party has upped its game in the seats it holds, and constituency polls show that its candidates there are much more popular locally than the party itself. And their opponents are distracted by the need to keep Ukip, the SNP and the Greens at bay. The public may yet give the party more credit, especially if it gets its messaging right. The liberal centre is not close-fought territory – it is notable that activists have never found the alternative parties less appealing than now.

But a job needs to be done to define better what the party stands for, and communicate this to the public. The party is confident of its core liberal values, but these are not producing sharp, distinctive policies for the more practical issues that bother voters – the economy and the NHS in particular. That’s a shame because some interesting thinking has come up through the party’s policy making machinery – but these ideas need to be turned into something much sharper. This week has not been particularly encouraging. The party has joined in the excessively negative slagging off of other parties – as have all the other parties, mainstream and fringe. Wouldn’t it be better to set out a stall of distinctive policies, on the economy, taxation, the environment and public service – and damn the other parties with faint praise? The public get that small parties can make a difference in coalition – but they need a better idea of what that difference might be in the case of the Lib Dems.

The party has to go through the final act of its years in coalition, and endure the outcome. After that though, the party needs a period of deep reflection, whether or not it re-enters government. But the country does need a liberal party, and there are no others challenging for that space.

 

Heywood & Middleton: banging on about the NHS is not enough for Labour

There were two parliamentary by-elections in England last night. At Clacton Tory defector Douglas Carswell was re-elected under the Ukip banner with a massive vote. This is a very striking result, but one that was entirely expected. The Essex seaside town of Clacton has a unique concentration of the older, white blue-collar types that are Ukip’s best hunting ground, and not a few lower middle class older white Tory types that are also tempted to vote for the party. The more thought provoking result was in the other election in the Greater Manchester seat of Heywood & Middleton. Ukip came within a whisker of beating Labour.

The best place to see the result is on Wikipedia. After searching the BBC and the main newspapers, all give snippets and verbiage, but don’t present the result simply and clearly – which says much about the narcissism of modern news reporting. The Labour vote share held at 40%, and even increased by a small fraction, albeit on a reduced turnout. The Conservative and Lib Dem votes collapsed (though both parties retained their deposits, a relief for the latter party); the racist BNP did well in 2010 (7% of the vote) but did not stand this time. Ukip gathered voters from all these sources to move from 2.6% to just over 40%. Given that this was a very short campaign – Labour moved the writ before its former MP’s funeral – this is a very significant achievement.

Labour were taking some comfort from the way their vote share held up, while the Tory and Lib Dem votes fell. This pattern repeated across the country could gift them a number of Tory and Lib Dem seats. We should not be surprised that professional election strategists could take pride in winning a House of Commons majority with one of the worst popular votes in Labour’s history (as 2010’s was) – but what kind of a mandate would that give the party’s leaders? The truth is that Labour’s strategy has gone off the rails. The plan is to hang on to the hard core of voters that the party retained in 2010, and to take about half of the Lib Dem vote. That should have taken them well past 50% in this constituency. For every vote they won back off the Lib Dems (and Tories for that matter), they lost one of their core voters to Ukip. Worse: in seats were the Lib Dems are weaker, for every two votes Labour wins back from that party, another one or more goes to Labour’s main opponents. Labour’s appeal is simply to weak to win.

Labour’s campaign was one-dimensional. They banged on about saving the NHS, which they claim is being sold off to private companies. This seems to resonate with voters, even though its relationship to the truth is weak – and if Labour were in power they would not be able to help much with the NHS’s troubles. Ukip’s policies on the NHS are far from reassuring, so this seemed to be a safe strategy. So Labour did not talk about Ukip’s favoured issue: immigration. This strategy clearly failed. Labour’s core, working class voters clearly want to talk about immigration, and are feeling ignored. But Labour does not know what to say without putting off other voters, such as those from ethnic minorities and liberals, to say nothing of its activists.

The trouble is that Labour is a fragile coalition of people who are united only in their dislike of the Conservatives. As soon as Labour start to become clearer about what their programme for government actually is, the more this coalition will fragment. Worse still, their campaigning is a classic mix of dissembling, lies and the building up of false expectations. This cannot bridge the gap of trust that lies behind the rise of Ukip.

To bridge the trust gap politicians must do things that hurt – that are against the apparent interests of their party and electoral prospects. The Lib Dems seem to understand this, to give them credit – though the public is unlikely to appreciate this until after next May, and their leader, Nick Clegg, has moved on. Some Tories do too – though not their leader, who will seemingly say anything to achieve a short-term advantage. But Labour has no conception of this idea. To them bravery is simply folly.

In the highly unstable mix of British five-way politics (including the SNP), it is entirely possible that Labour will achieve an overall majority. It may turn out to be a victory they regret achieving.